FRIDAY, June 28th, 8:20 pm
“GEORGIAN PANTOMIME NOVELLAS” / GEORGIA
Text author, director: Amiran Shalikashvili
Performers: Gigi Loria and Salome Palishvili
Costume design, production design, composer: Amiran Shalikashvili
Georgian State Pantomime Theater Amiran Shalikashvili Production, Georgia
The pantomime novella Vineyard is a novel starring a girl and a boy. The location of the action is Kakheti. Georgian folk music is played. On the stage, the girl is a personification of the grapevine, the boy looks after the grapevine, and the grapevine slowly grows. During that time, it produces grapes. A cluster of grapes is represented by a hand. The boy brings a basked and harvests the grapes… These symbolic details represent a birth of a child. (You are the vineyard) is heard again. The boy goes to the vineyard and starts looking after it…
AMIRAN SHALIKASHVILI is a Georgian pantomimist and one of the founders of pantomime in Georgia of the Soviet Union, the founder of Georgian National Pantomime Theater and the Department of Pantomime at the Shota Rustaveli Theater and Georgia State Film University. He was born in the city of Kokand (Uzbek Soviet Republic). He graduated from the Tbilisi Cultural Education Faculty in 1960, and in 1964 he graduated from Tbilisi State Theater Institute, specializing in Drama. On his initiative, the Pantomime Studio was founded in 1969, and in the same year the first work was performed – a collection of short stories titled “Dream and Reality”. This performance was so successful that the issue with the opening of Pantomime Theater within the Georgia Philharmonic was solved on January the 1st, 1976, when a group separated from the Philharmonic and founded the Georgian National Pantomime Theater, with Amiran as the director. He is responsible for the introduction of pantomime as an individual genre in Georgia. He established the Pantomimist Association which had its first international appearance in Greece in 1979, where they performed “Electra”. The performance was such a great success that one Greek writer said that the Georgian “Electra” is one of the biggest wonders that he has ever seen in his life. When he works with young actors, Shalikashvili prefers short pantomimic stories. In 2015, he won the Special WMO Award for the Outstanding Contribution to the Art of Mime.
GIGI LORIA and SALOME PALISHVILI are the leading actors and pantomimists in the Georgian State Pantomime Theater. They worked on numerous projects together, but they also individually participated in several productions of both the State Theater of Amiran Shalikashvili and countless other independent productions.